 landscapes that we inhabit and as you already know the series of talks and discussions so showcases new research and approaches to architecture and its histories but the hope really is to create conversations that allow us to think expansively about what both what art is and what architecture is. We'll cover a range of different topics over the next five sessions some of you were here already for last week's session on history designing architecture and we're looking at many different kinds of things over the next couple of weeks so please look at the program sign up and come back. I'm going to hand over to Rick's would try to talk you through today's event thanks. So thank you Sria for that introduction. It is my pleasure for our second event of the architecture summer series to introduce Jotri Chang and I'm so grateful that he's made the trip all the way from Singapore to share some of his latest research with us tonight. So the subject of his talk thermal governance and the modulation of heat as temperatures rise due to the climate crisis is of course a very topical issue but it's also a subject which shows how wide ranging and interdisciplinary architectural history is today. Tonight we'll hear about cases from Singapore and Doha two cities that heavily depended and depend on air conditioning and hear more on the spatial connections of thermal exchanges across different skills bodies interiors cities and even planets. Dr Chang is an associate professor of architecture at the National University of Singapore and works across works at the crossroads of architecture environment and STS or science and technology studies. In 2016 he published a genealogy of tropical architecture colonial networks nature and techno science a fascinating account of the long histories of tropical architecture and a study that has won several prizes such as the international planning history society book prize and it's also made a deep impact on me during my PhD and now I often listed as required reading for my students. A more recent book with Justin Wang and Darren so is titled everyday modernism architecture and society in Singapore and focuses on modernism and modernist heritage in Singapore through social histories of ordinary buildings infrastructures and landscapes. Our lecture tonight will be followed by a brief response from Kim Förster who is a lecturer at the University of Manchester and a visiting professor at the APFL in Lausanne. Previously he worked as an associate director of research at the CCA or the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. One of the projects he led there was a multidisciplinary research project on architecture and for the environment as part of the Andrew Mellon Foundation's architecture urbanism and humanities initiative which has recently resulted in a beautiful publication environmental histories of architecture which our speaker tonight was also part of. His research and teaching focus on environmental and material histories and particularly on the global history of spent as a commodity. He's published also widely but I would just like to briefly mention his contribution to Beyond Concrete in 2022 a book that questions strategies for post fossil building culture. Now if you would please join me in welcoming our speaker, Jack Lee Chang. Thank you Lee for the very generous introduction. Thanks also to Reeds and Shreya for organizing this lecture series and for having me in the for inviting me for this lecture series. I would also like to thank Kim for responding to this and also for everyone here for attending tonight's lecture. I know there are probably better things for you to do out there so I'm thankful for the time that you're gonna spend here. This is a work that has been in long progress. One or two of the audience members might have heard a previous iteration of this. I hope today is a positive development from a previous iteration and because it's a work in progress so there are things that are unresolved, there are questions, there are gaps so feel free to raise any questions or comments on this later. So with that let me start. As temperature rises and heat waves become more frequent and intense due to the climate crisis, cooling technologies, particularly air conditioning, have received much attention from global environmental NGOs and international media. International Energy Agency 2018 report The Future of Cooling, for instance, highlights the threat posed by the code, rampant growth in demand for space cooling with far-reaching implications for emissions, energy security and electricity costs, end code, and cause the threat of looming cold crunch. It warns that if unchecked, the global energy demands of air conditioning were more than triple by 2050, which will strain energy infrastructure and exacerbate climate change. Most of this escalation in global energy demands rather for air conditioning will take place in the global south due to the convergence of climatic, economic and demographic trends. In 2018, another report titled Chilling Prospects Providing Sustainable Cooling for All was released by an NGO Sustainable Energy for All. Taking a broad understanding of cooling, including both space cooling and cold supply chain, the CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, Richard Kite, said, quote, in a world facing continuously rising temperature, assess to cooling is not a luxury, it's essential for everyday life, end quote. Given the importance of cooling, the report urges government around the world to close the cooling access gap for the estimated 1.1 billion population, mostly in the global south again, who are currently unsurfed or undersurfed by space cooling and cold supply chain for them to meet UN sustainable development goals. From the two reports, the key challenge seems to be how do we cool the world's population in an equitable manner without further warming the planet? In 2018, the Global Cooling Prize was launched to address this challenge through a technological fix. Organized by Rocky Mountain Institute and supported by the Indian government, the prize was a multi-stage competition with a total reward of $3 million in search of an affordable and radically efficient room air conditioner designed primarily for the hot climates of emerging economies. The Global Cooling Prize Techno-centric approach to a social environmental problem is typical of prevailing methods. In disaggregating and isolating the techno-scientific from the social, reducing cooling to a technical problem to be solved by engineers and technologies, the organizers of the prize have ungrittingly followed what media studies scholar Niko Starrasowski called thermal objectivity. Subscribing to the belief that temperature is independent of culture and heat is only a subject of scientific study. Starrasowski contends that thermal objectivity marks the operation of thermal power, which is, quote, the enactment of social and political power through thermal manipulation that today constitute a pervasive means of biological, social, and environmental control, unquote. Thermal objectivity is closely bound up with thermal universalism in that the thermal is not only seen as being separate from society and culture, it's also understood as being without history and even independent from place. This lecture questions the underlying thermal objectivity and thermal universalism in the pervasive technical solutionism to the conundrum of equitable cooling in the midst of the climate crisis by exploring the techno-politics and social technical histories or mechanical cooling in two cities in the Global South, Singapore and Doha. Both are characterized by thermal heterogeneities that are in part typical of and in part exceptional for the Southeast Asian and Arabian Gulf regions they are in, making them, in my view, fascinating cases. As heat acts on body and affects their thermal regulatory mechanisms and metabolism, thus influencing the productivity, health, and well-being of populations, I argue that regulating the intensity and distribution of heat in the environment, particularly urban environment where population concentrate has historically been a matter of biopolitical concern and was subjected to modern governmental intervention. Using the concept of thermal governance to describe such state intervention, this lecture foregrounds the roles and the underlying political rationales of the developmental state of Singapore and the oil rentier state of Qatar in the air conditioning of the urban-built environment. It also emphasizes, and this is perhaps the part that is rather tenuously linked to the notion of British art, the influence of thermal imperialism on colonies and dependencies like Singapore and Doha during and after former colonialism. This talk is organized around two historical cases, one each in Singapore and Doha. So without further ado, let us start with the first case. In 1969, a mere four years after Singapore became independent, a proposal for the building of a district cooling system in the city centre was put forward by International Air Conditioning or IAC, Singapore Private Limited, which was a distributor of carrier air conditioner in Singapore, Malaysia and the region. The proposal was closely studied by and received significant support from government agencies such as the Urban Renewal Department or URD, Public Works Department and Public Utility Board. The Development Bank of Singapore or DBS, which was established by the Singapore government in 1968, to finance Singapore's industrialisation was also involved in the proposal. Alan Cho, the head of the URD and the planner in charge of Singapore's Urban Renewal, was very keen on the proposal and encouraged the DBS to take a leading role in the project. DBS subsequently agreed to finance 25% of the building of the district cooling system. DBS financing commitment provided a significant boost for the proposal as it was a capital intensive project. Designed to supply chill water as a public utility for the air conditioning of the surrounding buildings, a district cooling system is an infrastructure that consists of at least two main components, a central cooling plant that houses centrifugal chillers to provide chill water and a network of pipes to distribute the chill water from the plant to the surrounding buildings. As the compressive refrigeration technology behind the chillers was energy intensive and enormous amount of electricity was needed to power them, the quantity was so large that the IAC proposer even included the possibility of generating its own electricity. The idea of selling chill water from a central plant for air conditioning was first proposed by Willis Carrier, the quote-unquote father of air conditioning in 1940. However, it was only implemented for the first time in Hufford in 1962. By 1970, there were still very few companies operating district cooling system in North America and in the same year, a district cooling system was first built in Asia at the site of the Osaka Expo. Even then, the high-tech implementation of a network computer-controlled district cooling system in Osaka was regarded as a failure as it produced an uneven distribution of coolness. In other words, at the time that the Singapore proposer was put forward, district cooling was still a relatively new and unproven technology, especially outside the United States. Although the district cooling proposer by IAC was subsequently not implemented for reasons not stated in the archival documents, it was very seriously considered and close to being realized. Why was Singapore a newly independent nation with a modest economy at that time, seemingly willing to invest in such a capital intensive and untested idea of providing air conditioning as a public utility? Relatedly, why was air conditioning considered an essential utility in Singapore, or at least for a city centre, when it was still widely considered as a luxury in the developing world? To answer this question, one might start by looking more closely at one of the two schemes in the proposer, that for the downtown district. The schemes show the chill water pipes laid in three phases, as you see on the screen expressed in different colours. The proposed distribution of the chill water pipes suggests that they were laid out to serve two types of development. The first consisted of old colonial government buildings at that time occupied or managed by the post-independent government. This included the City Hall, Supreme Court, Parliament House, Emperor's Place, Victoria Theatre, Fullerton Building, Hill Street Police Station, National Museum, National Library, all concentrated around the colonial civic district. This colonial processes buildings typically have lofty and well ventilated interiors with high ceiling and large windows. These features were designed to ameliorate the hot and humid tropical climate of Singapore. However, air conditioning was installed and spaces were renovated with ceilings lowered and opening sealed in many of these buildings from the 1950s to accommodate mechanical cooling. The second type of development that the circuits of the chill water pipes in the proposed district cooling system were designed to serve were the new buildings being planned for the plots of reclaimed land along Beech Road and Shenton Way. These were plots of land sold by the government under its sales of site program in 1968 and 1969. According to the planning guideline issued by the state planning agency, these developments would be modernized high-rise podium tower blocks. They had deep floor plates that had to be mechanically cool and artificially lit, making them an air-conditioned typology. Although the podium tower block was a global typology first established in North America by a number of emblematic air condition buildings, it acquired rather different social technical significance in the 1960s and 1970s context of Singapore. Conceived for Singapore in the early 1960s as shown in the aerial perspective on the screen, the podium tower blocks were envisioned as a part of the modern spatial order that would displace the old colonial shop house city. Shop houses are terrace houses originally planned with features like courtyards and louver windows to facilitate passive cooling by keeping the sun out and allowing air circulation. But since the early 20th century, shop houses has been deemed as overcrowded and in-century slums ripe for demolition. Shop houses were porous not just environmentally but also spatially that brewed the boundaries between the interior and the exterior. As the name shop house suggests, this will mix use neighborhood combining commercial and residential spaces. The streets also took on multiple users as market, food center and conduits for both pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Such users of indoor and outdoor spaces follow a pattern that was in tune with the Diana and seasonal changes of environmental conditions. During the mid 20th century, such spaces of rhythmic intermingling were deemed messy, inefficient and in-century and they were to be ordered, rationalized and cleansed. In contrast, the podium tower blocks were much larger hermetically sealed building that created interiorized environment that rely on air conditioning to create a thermostady state across time and space to keep their inhabitants comfortable so as to allow uninterrupted and extended use of a space unaffected by Diana and seasonal changes. The boundaries with the exterior also clearly demarcated and spaces were zoned for different functions for the purpose of order and efficiency. In short, podium tower blocks represented not just a modern visual and spatial order distinct from its other of the colonial shophouse city. It also represented a new ambient environment of constant and consistent, chilled, dehumidified air made possible by air conditioning. In the post-independent state of Singapore, such atmospheric conditions were regarded as politically and economically important. The first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge-educated anglophone elite, famously said, I quote, air conditioning was the most important invention for us. Perhaps one of the signal invention of history, it changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. One forgets this, living in North America or Europe or Northern Asia. With our air conditioning, you can work well only in the cool early morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where silver surveys work. This was key to public efficiency. End quote. The air conditioning of colonial buildings occupied by the post-independent government and the embedding of air conditioning in the built environment through urban branding guidelines that prescribed the podium tower typology in Singapore's city centre could therefore be attributed to the importance Lee's government plays on air conditioning. All this eventually turned Singapore into an air conditioned nation with chilled, dehumidified air enjoyed by its population as an ambient entitlement. But how do we understand the correlation that Lee and other colonial bourgeoisie including members of his cabinet make between environment, labour productivity and development? Why did Lee assume that the hot and humid climate of Singapore would diminish both physical and mental labour productivity and taught social economic development? And where did the belief that air conditioning was critical to overcoming the climatic barrier to efficient work and the attainment of civilisation come from? I argue that they were shaped by two constellations of powerful ideas from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first was the colonial environmental imaginary of the tropics as an uninhabitable towering zone and social environmental other to the temperate norm that was not only excessively hot and dangerously unhealthy for the white man but also uncivilised and backward as compared to Europe and North America. The rise and fall of the myosomatic theories of disease transmission and the emergence of tropical medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries contributed to the imaginary of the tropics as a negative authority. More than just a work of imagination, such imaginary has in the words of Timothy Mitchell, quote, force and durability from the way it is reproduced and extended in rebuilt and reordered words, end quote. The second constellation of ideas could be traced to the birth of thermodynamics in the 19th century. The two laws of thermodynamics on the conservation of energy and the irreversible dispassion of energy or entropy combined to emphasise the importance of energy conservation. Socially, these two scientific laws gave rise to what political scientists carry a new digit called energy as a ruling idea in which energy became a hegemonic unit of equivalence used to compare entities across time and space. It was most significantly used in the governance of work by evaluating, quantifying and disciplining work according to the energy infused matrix of efficiency and productivity. Under the logic of energy, the human body turned into a machine for energy conversion and conservation. As energy is seen as permeating through everything, connections were also made between environmental and bodily energies especially in work sites. Few of knowledge pertaining to the science of work such as tailorism, ergonomics and industrial physiology emerged from the 19th century to govern labouring bodies and non-human exemplages in workplaces across Europe, North America and their colonies. One of the main preoccupations in the science of work was human fatigue as it affected production and output. Fatigue was sometimes also attributed to the work environments of factories where heat emitted and humidity caused by machines and industrial processes were not properly dissipated, creating hot and steamy atmosphere. Combining these two constellations of ideas of the colonial environmental imaginary of the tropics and the understanding of the thermal environments of work based on energetics, the tropical environment began to be seen as energy draining and even nerve-wracking causing mental pathologies like tropical neurostenia and fatigue. For instance, a Yale geographer, Elso Huntington, famously argued that climatic conditions affected the global distribution of human energy with hot climates leading to inertia and manifesting the lack of industry and civilizational attainment in the tropics. Sorry about that. Let me reopen the file. Alongside this environmentally determined and racist view of the tropics, there was another view that could be characterized as environmentally possibilities and ameliories while sharing with the determinists the colonial environmental imaginary that saw the heat and humidity of the tropics as inhibiting social economic development. The latter view believed that cooling technologies could overcome such environmental shortcomings that in part accounted for the colonial obsession with cooling technologies, especially air conditioning in the first half of the 20th century. A self-styled, ceaseless advocate for air conditioning in the British Empire was C.A. Middleton Smith, the Taikoo Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hong Kong. Smith, whose view was widely published and reported, including in British Malaya that Singapore was a part of, was convinced that air conditioning would further the British civilizing mission in its tropical colonies. He wrote, I quote, only those who have worked in the tropics for years can have any knowledge of the innovating effect of excessive humidity in the atmosphere. And that the mental and physical efficiencies of humans under certain local climatic conditions is about one half that of what is an ideal climate. It is obvious that when the climate is so depressing the vitality, ideal atmospheric conditions can be provided within a building. There will be a great stimulus to the economic development of the tropics because of the resulting increase in human efficiency. The Empire has been made the trustee for such a large area of land within the tropics for is the duty of the British to accelerate its economic development for the benefit of humanity. Air cooling will be a great factor in carrying that duty. End quote. We would find Smithville Express in the 1936 article rather familiar as the same assumptions about the effects of tropical climate on human productivity and conversely a similar faith in air conditioning's impact on development could also be found in Lee's earlier statement from 1999. Despite the 60 odd years that separate the two statements it's clear that colonial ideas continue to be inferential in post-independence Singapore. When air conditioning was initially introduced to colonial Singapore during the 1930s its use was very limited. As an expensive technology to install and operate only a small social economic elite in the colonial society could afford it. The cool dry air of air conditioning was a thermal privilege that few enjoyed in colonial Singapore. Most of the colonised population still languished in overcrowded, insanitary, deraillic, hot and poorly ventilated structures. With decolonisation and the emergence of Singapore first as a self-government entity in 1959 and finally as a fully independent polity in 1965 thermal governance was significantly reconfigured. Unlike the colonial period the prevalence of heat stress could no longer be accepted as an excuse for underdevelopment of the tropics in the new era when development was promoted globally by both governmental and non-governmental organisation. In addition to the will to develop and other impetus for climatic modification at that time was the taxic acceptance that freedom from heat stress and the associated fatigue, exhaustion and injury was a part of universal human rights. Sorry about that maybe it's too hot too much heat. In this context the climatic possibilities and ameliories theory of control and modification become even more inferential. The proposition made by British politician Sidney Frank Markham in 1947 that quote one of the basic reasons for the rise of a nation in modern time is his control over climatic conditions end quote resonated with many including Prime Minister Lee as we saw earlier and informed the widespread implementation of climatic modifications through planning and design. Imposed independent Singapore climatic modifications for thermal governance took place in conjunction with his territorial revolution which involved not just urban renewal and the building of podium tower blocks but also the construction of infrastructure and mass housing that transformed the land, water and air of the city state. Although not explicated thermal comfort was central to the plan. Due to resource constraint air conditioning was only used for podium tower blocks in the city centre while the majority of the other spaces were designed to minimise discomfort through passive design strategies creating a heterogeneous thermoscape. The post-independent reconfiguration of thermal governance in Singapore also entailed major changes in the urban metabolism of the city state. The most significant of which is the expansion in electricity generation capacity which depended on fossil fuel sources. Singapore's status as a petrochemical hub which once has the world's third largest refining capacity for crude oil certainly enabled this expansion especially during the 1970s oil crisis. On this note of fossil fuel and urban metabolism let us move to our second case. In February 1982 the Doha Sheraton Hotel and Conference Centre designed by American architecture firm William L. Pereira Associate was officially opened by the airmail of Qatar Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad El-Thani on the 10th anniversary of his reign. Cited on the prominent location on the new district of Doha the 150 million US dollars complex was in the words of his architect intended as quote a hotel or world prestige an institution for the country's frequent occasion of celebration. And a centre for Qatar's participation in world's affair end quote. Completed at the end of the oil boom in petroleum exporting countries in the 1970s to 1980s which in the West was known as the oil crisis initiated by the 1973 OPEC embargo. The complex could be seen as exemplifying the urban environmental and metabolic reconfiguration of Doha enabled by the oil boom. The location of the complex reflected its significance. Cited on the strategic board of land at the northern end of the Cornish with scarcely any other buildings around the Doha Sheraton enjoys sweeping panoramic view. It was also designed by Pereira as a quote sculpture monument with a strong dramatic profile that dominates the skyline. End quote. Today the Cornish serve as Doha's main scenic and ceremonial space it first appear as an important urban element in the second master plan of Doha prepared in 1975 by the same firm William Pereira Associates. The master plan was commissioned by the Qatar State primarily to lay out the new district a large area reclaimed from the salt marshes and tidal flats to the northeast of the old Doha. In Pereira's master plan the Cornish was envisioned as an urban spine along the waterfront that connects the new and old urban district in Doha together while also restructuring the urban growth pattern of the city. To augment this new urban pattern that reoriented the city to the Doha Bay Pereira planned a few focal points along the Cornish to clearly mark the start the midpoint and the end point to give it what he called a visual unity. The Doha Sheraton complex marks the end of this urban spine as you can see on the screen. Within the perimeter forms of the complex there is a large 13 story atrium the atrium had been compared to the central courtyard of the traditional house in the region by the architect. He saw both as inward-looking central spaces where rooms were arranged around. Both typologies also purportedly offered environmental shelter from the sun, wind and dust of the desert. However, compared to the traditional house the complex had entirely different construction material construction methods and environmental technologies. While the traditional house had thick envelope built from locally and regionally sourced materials such as limestone mud and gravels for the wall and mangrove wood beams bamboo mat woven wreath and mud for the roof. The Doha Sheraton was built of modern materials like steel and reinforced concrete that were sourced from a geographically much larger and much more distributed network. For example, the structure was a steel frame manufactured in Japan by Kawada industry shaped to Doha and erected by the team of Japanese worker. Wrapping around the steel frame were precast concrete parts fabricated in the new state of art planned in Qatar established especially for the construction of its complex. The cabinetry was fabricated in Korea and imported by the general contractor Hyundai Engineering and Construction. Other materials and equipment came from England, United States and Germany. All these were built and example by the team of construction workers from South Asia. In terms of environmental technology the traditional houses depended on their building materials to provide good thermal insulation from the hot climate. The presence of liwan or veranda for sunshading and the incorporation of bedjew which refer to both wind towers or air vents that channel air and facilitated ventilation to cool the interior. The environmental technologies at Doha Sheraton were fundamentally different. Although the atrium was analogized to a traditional courtyard it relied on one of the largest and most sophisticated air conditioning installation in the Middle East to provide chill dehumidified air. Like any air conditioning system the one at the complex operated on the principle of keeping the interior hermetically sealed from the exterior. A 1980s brochure of the hotel described the atrium as a quote luxurious, climatically controlled oasis of pools and large trees. Unquote. A contemporary commentator noted that the word oasis was the most frequently used word to describe the planted atrium of new hotels in the Gulf Cooperation Council or GCC countries. Other examples included Sajja Intercontinental Hotel designed by the architects Collaborative and Dubai Sheraton designed by Radar Mileto Associates. Although almost never discussed in contemporary sources the amount of electricity needed to mechanically cool such large spaces in the hot climate of the region must have been enormous. One of the main but unwritten factors enabling the construction of complexes of this typology in the Gulf was the vast quantity of cheap electricity in the region. Though grander than most other buildings in Doha the changes in construction material, methods and environmental technologies witnessed in Doha Sheraton also refracted or bet at a much larger scale and greater intensity broader built environmental changes in the city. The use of thin, thermally conductive concrete and glass envelope in place of traditional well insulated thick walls and roofs were already seen in the modern buildings widely erected during the 1970s urban expansion of the city. The replacement of passive cooling features with air conditioning to keep the inhabitants comfortable was also a really a widespread phenomenon by the 1970s. Together with automobile dependency created by the new road systems that included the Cornish these processes of urbanisation and architectural production will make possible by heavily state subsidised energy services. Like its GCC's neighbour Qatar is a distributive state unlike a traditional state that extracts revenue from its population through taxation a distributed state expands revenue in this case the revenue from oil or oil rent that went directly to state or more accurately the family state. Urbanisation through land acquisition and housing subsidies and social welfare that included free education free healthcare and well-renumerated employment for its population were two of the main ways that the state distributes oil wealth to gain political support and questions. In addition the state also provided heavily subsidised electricity and water which were enabled by the abundant oil and gas that the territory produced. This official beneficence contributed to the steep rise in electricity consumption. We could also be partly accounted for by the widespread and excessive use of air conditioning. Not only was the use of mechanical cooling widespread the thermostat was often set very low the enormous climate the enormous climate control atrium in Doha Sheraton exemplifies such a form of state-sponsored thermal entitlement. As with the earlier case of Singapore the notion of thermal privilege in the post-independent aftermath of colonialism in Doha was also inextricably linked to the history of colonial environmental imaginary and energetics. In Doha case is different political dynamics historically contributed to a distinct configuration of thermal privilege and violence. Like the tropics the desert environment of the Middle East and North African region was historically represented as a strange and defective one in order to justify colonial environmental interventions and legitimize colonial rule. Scholars like Diana Harris sorry Diana Davis have shown that the hegemonic imaginary of the regions purportedly errant eridity shaped colonial and post-colonial policies and practices in agriculture, forestation, hydraulic infrastructure and many other fields. While such attention has been paid to the colonial environmental imaginary on the desert's eridity there appeared to be much less research done on the imaginary on the desert heat and how that helped to remake the physical world and its atmosphere. Historian Toby Jones noted that one of the major sources of political authority and legitimacy of the regime in the Gulf state stand from their ability to alter the old environmental imaginary of desert by modifying the hot and arid landscape into one that is cool and fertile so as to provide their population physical relief from the perils of desert life. He argued that the remaking of nature was a form of statecraft in which power over the environment was also power over the population to the extent that they emerge a kind of environmental subjectivity. While Jones' focus was on water and hydraulic technology, his argument could well be extended to heat and thermal technologies as anthropologist Gautja Gunnar did with her work on the region. In our discussion of the climatically controlled oasis of Doha Sheraton earlier, we saw the hotel atrium expression of thermal entitlement and even privilege. Thermal privilege functions through the provision of luxury and access way beyond basic biological needs. It's about the turning of bodily termosception to express affluence and perhaps even influence. In the middle is the most conspicuous consumers of mechanical cooling in the early years with the royal family. As a carrier corporation executive wrote in an internal memo in 1959, I quote, we have served many kings. I can recall King Farouk of Egypt, King Fizer of Iraq, King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Saud's son of King Ibn Saud, King Haile Selassie, King Hussein of Jordan and many other rulers, Queens, Prince and Princesses, end quote. The comments about royal family including the two generations of the House of Saud and air conditioning was made after King Saud asked Carrier to install one of the world's largest air conditioning system for a new city built specially to house its extended royal family of 15,000 members. This district cooling system supplied chill water to 134 buildings in 19 miles of pipes from seven centrifugal chillers. King Saud's private city was preceded and succeeded by a number of other large air conditioning installation in Saudi Arabia. Such a form of thermal privilege as expressed through excessively large air conditioning capacity could also be clearly seen in the other gas states including Qatar. Sorry about that. A few more slides to go so hopefully this will be the last one. Earlier we discussed the influence of thermal dynamics and energetics on the governance of work through the regulation of laboring bodies and their work environment to avert entropy that was manifested as human fatigue expert in the science of work tested and recommended ergonomics improvement to workplaces. Among the recommendation were those regulating the thermal environment so as to protect workers from exposure to extreme heat. While such recommendations were taken up by some Europeans and North American states they were ignored elsewhere as historian Om Barak argued other epistemologies were in operation and exceptions were made to European norms as quote the empire created a constitutive outside of thermal dynamics. Unquote. Barak argument was based on his study of the strokers working in the engine rooms of steamship traversing the Red Sea ports during the 19th century. Racial physiology that ling darker skin colors to higher biological heat tolerance was used to justify the exposure of Somalis and Adenic stokers to intense heat and their suffering from frequent heat injuries in the underbellies of these ships. Such a disparity in the thermal exposure between different workers rationalized on the premise of essentialized racial difference was later also seen in the early oil towns in the Gulf region in places such as Durham, Saudi Arabia, Awali, Bahrain and Amadi in Kuwait while executives live in large air-conditioned houses and were provided air-conditioned amenities. Mechanical cooling were also supplemented by the shade of outdoor greenery in the gardens and parks of these oil towns. While the white expatriates enjoy such thermal privileges, other residents of oil towns were less fortunate. Some might even be subjected to what Staroselsky called thermal violence through the exposure to high temperature and heat stress. Influenced by the segregated planning norms of British colonialism and the Jim Crow system of the American South, these oil towns were organized in a hierarchical manner that divided the workers into on-craves according to various social and racial logic. For example, in Durham Oil Town operated by a Remco, Saudi and other Arab unskilled workers were housed in Barasti or forest huts with tetched palm-from-roofs that had no running water and electricity until the late 1940s while white American managers live in air-conditioned California-style ranches with access to swimming pools. This race-based system of thermal privilege and violence, which was first established in the late 19th century, later became entrenched in the early oil towns of the 1950s, was transformed in the subsequent decades as the oil companies in the Gulf states were nationalized. As the white expatriates departed, the national took on their positions and entitlements. The Arab unskilled workers at the lower round were also replaced by migrant workers from South Asia and elsewhere. The early oil town could arguably be seen as models that influenced the broader patterns of urbanization in the Gulf. The hierarchical and segregated planning of these oil towns were reproduced in the Oncravic Gulf cities just as the colonial racial ideas behind the oil towns were echoed in what Ahmad Ahmad Khan caused the ethnocracy of Gulf states which was governed by a ruling elite a ruling ethnic group sorry a ruling ethnic group that enable the domination of the Gulf Arab nationals. These citizens were a minority in the wealthy GCC states enjoying exclusive entitlements. Social culture and spatial environmental distinctions were carefully configured through architecture and urban planning to differentiate them from migrants. Thermal power as articulated through thermal privilege and violence was part of this broader pattern of distinction and exploitation that we might discern from the recent work up controversies. As a way I think this is fine since that's the last slide as a way to conclude I'd like to briefly discuss three points. One, state and thermal governance. Two, thermal imperialism, environment and energetics. Three, architecture, metabolism. By examining the thermal politics by examining the thermal politics and history of air conditioning and the built environment in Singapore and Doha this lecture challenged the underlying thermal objectivity in the current approaches to cooling at a time of the climate crisis. It foregrounds the role played by states and in these two cases the post-colonial, bio and techno politics of thermal governance in developmental and oil-rentier states. In this way this lecture broadens the current scholarship on air conditioning that tends to focus on the role played by private corporation and the influence of the market economy especially that in the West. In highlighting the involvement of colonial and post-colonial states in air conditioning project this lecture also showed the lingering influence of thermal imperialism. Thermal imperialism operates in at least two ways. Firstly through the manner colonial environmental imaginaries of the tropics and the desert influence state actors and the way they reordered the built environment. Secondly through the manner colonial energetic shape of disciplining of bodies control of metabolism and regulation of work and work environments to further development. In other words thermal imperialism informs our ideas of thermal rights privilege and violence and the exercise of thermal power in the global south. Finally this lecture attempts to situate architecture in relation to thermal governance and thermal imperialism by seeing it as a metabolic vehicle directing or diverting catalyzing or inhibiting thermal energy flows within urban metabolism. In this way a building or infrastructure becomes a trans-scaler and trans-temporal entity involved in thermal exchangers and resource flow connecting sites in Asia to the planetary and the anthropocytic. Thank you. Thank you very much Chhatvi for this excellent lecture. My name is Confirster and I was asked to give a response in 10 minutes or so and due to the time I prepared three points according to the three points of your conclusion but maybe I stick to two first and just to have time for the discussion. Also, I don't know whether there's comments from the online audience so please help me out later on with this but I'm very curious to look into those terminological developments that you make because I think this is the great contribution with this paper somehow with regard to thermal governance but then also the environmental narrative that you develop through comparing those two examples and maybe we discuss the architectural part like all together. So my first response concerns your work as not only an architectural historian but with regard to this terminological work your political analysis eating somehow and also in all those dialogues that you laid out and which I think is important to entertain somehow in central to you lecture is this framing that you started from the current situation somehow for global heating with an uncertain outcome and in contrast cooling as a human right which I think is very powerful and those two cases contribute to it especially in the tropics being located in the tropics and I think those storylines of climatization are essential there to highlight those. So I'm summarizing a bit but I'm commenting but I'm also presenting to two questions since you're historicized and politicized those approaches to cooling as examples of thermal governance and I think Michel Foucault's notion of governance somehow of governing a population already occupied your work even with this genealogy of tropical architecture so it's a continuation in a way what you've been doing and the two cases you study that combine bio and techno politics somehow Singapore since independence and Doha with oil boom informed by approaches then of the history of science and technology media studies history, anthropology allowed you I think to enter this role of the state and the state enterprises in the creation of comfort which you also discuss as social construct at the intersection of statecraft of climate control of productivity and what was new for me here was how you discuss this reconfiguration of thermal governance in terms of district cooling and I wonder how you would like yourself put this back to the table because it's I think innovative work that you've been doing using both the example of Singapore with this like three phase expansion somehow with regard to British colonial era buildings adapted for climate control and then those new podium tower blocks and then maybe this is also like to take some lessons from and I think it is essential to also acknowledge the American origin willing carrier plays a role for your research as the founder of the International Carrier Corporation with regard to this national development of Singapore and Doha on the other hand I think is a powerful parallel case that you develop where the local Sheraton also an American design with its glass roof atrium somehow that you discussed quite beautifully is exemplary for the strict separation that we are facing somehow of inside and outside and also the urban planning and reorganization that goes with it somehow and I think what is important is to know that you discuss both cases with regard to oil industries and oil businesses as the precondition but also this complication of both cases and what I find intriguing is somehow that your stories are not just about cooling and air conditioning but much more so it's not only about this mechanical type but rather somehow you have this broader processes of urbanization happening of modernization of state also of architecture I think that is independence on oil and I think this is a relevant move that you make somehow and you introduce this concept of fossil developmentalism by Elizabeth Chatterjee as a counter term to Timothy Mitchell's fossil capitalism and I think this kind of global ecology is maybe something to look at again and significant here is your highlighting of Singapore's reputation as Houston of Asia which is a parallel story of that of OPEC I think so one of the questions that I have with regard to this like epistemological work that you're doing is to what extent does this concept of thermal governance enable you to write a rather nuanced and more complex history both of the two sides but also of cooling in general and what analytical but also critical potential does the concept have for you if you have to put it in in a nutshell somehow what is your position then to those developments of the state and of architecture somehow that you have described so beautifully here which are also always reversible so this is my first comment or response and the second is a bit broader somehow with regard to what you termed thermal imperialism and environment and yeah relates to this very own voice that you've developed over the last years with this research with regard to Singapore and Doha somehow in addition to the energy and environmental perspective which you add to the literature which I'm very yeah in favor of and also would like to highlight as your main achievement somehow and this goes along different scales and you highlighted it's architectural and urban at the same time but the territory of the state comes in and then there's this interplay of the globe and the planetary that you ended with so somehow we've known each other for a couple of years for five years and have been working in this project that Riggs mentioned architecture and for the environment at the Canadian Centre for Architecture which aimed to rewrite architectural history and your contribution was essential to it somehow through notions of the environment and also in a global perspective and I think this is where you enter into the dialogue and this project you might want to look it up somehow is now published in chapters of access via library stack and ranges from coal also to bring it back to London as a thing, as an object being traded in the coal exchange and financing somehow urban developments in London to the Amazon as a region, a landscape to be demanded heritage status for and this was Paul Tavares project to just want to go online with it and I think your project somehow was as much entering a global south and Asian voice to the table and this paper was a further development that I value highly somehow with regard to exactly thermal governance but also thermal violence as a term and so I would be curious somehow to what extent those two cases both of Singapore and Doha that you put next to each other as in your previous iteration here now would take on a different life for you because I think they do and how you relate them so what is this comparison actually doing in looking at somehow cooling again with regard to exactly this history that you write critical but also we discussed a lot to what extent do those histories become operative so what are the notions of architecture and cooling that go along with it and also linking climate history and human history differently so maybe you can reflect about somehow this juxtaposition that you offer here again and how you thought about it differently within your work and to whatever also allow us to see how you think with both cases together but also differently first of all thank you for that fascinating lecture and thank you for the response could I ask you first to reply to Kim's maybe one, maybe two points thanks so much Kim for the questions I think your two questions the first one is about perhaps it's about what analytical utility or what do I gain by deploying the concept of thermal governance why do I use it so one reason for using thermal governance is to not to look at air conditioning in isolation not to look at cooling for comfort in isolation versus cooling for other purposes for example during heat wave whereby it's more than comfort it's more a matter of life and death so I thought I wanted to understand a whole spectrum of cooling and cooling for different purposes from situation of what we call normality in terms of comfort and also extreme cases in terms of life-saving and it becomes a rye and no longer kind of a luxury I thought what is interesting in this moment is that the boundary between where essential or necessity and and luxury begins is no longer so clear because the whole range of rising temperature, heat waves and things like that so I began looking at various standards not just thermal comfort standard but also heat action plans and also about the kind of industrial health and standards for what constitute unbearable thermal distress in work environment and then I thought maybe it would be interesting or at least that is the ambition to pull these different strengths together under one spectrum and using thermal governance to really analyse that so thermal governance just referring to any forms of thermal intervention into the spectrum and not just to look at comfort versus something else for example and of course governance as a work also I think maybe I alluded to this in my talk, foreground the role that is played by state intervention and you briefly mentioned I think Elizabeth Chatterjee which was subsequently dropped from my lecture script but Elizabeth Chatterjee developed this idea of fossil developmentalism versus Andrew Maum's notion of fossil capital so fossil capital is that narrative about how private capital was essential in this whole process of carbon lock-in during the industrial revolution but Elizabeth Chatterjee argued that it's not private capital that play an important role in Asia I think she did two cases in India in post-independent India and also in Maoist China I believe and she argued that the developmental state the development and the state was the key player in terms of driving the kind of a carbon lock-in and also the escalation in carbon emission so I think there are two parts to that one, thinking about the spectrum using the word thermal and the other part thinking about the state and the politics in relation to the state through the word governance so hopefully that answers your first question second question I came to look at these two cases in a rather unplanned manner I happened to I'm from Singapore so I'm interested in Singapore and subsequently through working with a few colleagues we got a research ground from the Qatar government and we ended up working in Qatar so and then that's how these two cases came together as you probably know through the project for the longest time I've been struggling thinking about how to discuss these two cases together I think the easy way to talk about them together is that both are in some ways addicted to air conditioning Singapore is an air-conditioned nation Qatar is a place that air-conditioning is also very prevalent and is available everywhere so I thought that that is perhaps one way to think about it and then later I I thought about it in another way especially during the pandemic where during the pandemic and during the last World Cup, the last FIFA World Cup there were media reports about mistreatment of migrant workers and how migrant workers were dying from heat injuries and heat illnesses so that's a kind of a thermal violence that led me to think about Qatar and in Singapore there was a similar thing maybe less reported by international media but there are also forms of violence that were highlighted during the pandemic so and I became interested in that concept and of course Nico Sarsowsky's book was published in 2021 in the midst of the pandemic as well and she given, I mean from that book I've acquired a kind of hopefully a kind of conceptual toolkit to talk about things like that and you probably read that she wrote about thermal violence in a journal article first and subsequently she developed it for her book Mediahot and Co and that was a really powerful book it's this concept just to chime in Nico Sarsowsky develops with regard to the sweatbox as a carceral instrument where the body becomes the medium to exercise heat on human bodies and what I find powerful is that you apply to architecture both historically with regard to the other cities in the Gulf region somehow where it's somehow the division the unevenness of air conditioning in the urban realm but also you apply to the present situation then not the same but somehow you see a continuation I guess or he's a suggest one maybe you want to comment on this continuation the continuation part as I said earlier this is a work in progress so because of the pandemic I've not been able to carry out a few work in the Gulf region so I plan to plan to go there hopefully in the in the next half a year or a year and get a deeper understanding of that so I don't really know what happens there besides what I'm reading from the media report so I probably need to know a bit more before making the kind of assertion about the more violence over there you know let's open it up to questions from the audience Mark okay thanks a lot for that it's a typical production of great research and you know some really great thinking and I too like the way which you mobilise certain terms like thermal violence and thermal privilege I had really I guess two question comments about two terms I was also exercised by the term governance so I'd like to hear more about that because I'm not sure whether thermal governance in the way you're using it here is any different from a term like thermal thermal management and given that you make lots of references to what we could call government sorry governments in the formal sense Indian governments governments around the world dynastic governments like Singapore then you know where is the politics here because I'm not convinced it belongs in the term governance so that's one comment and it's you know you'd expect that from me the other is about universalism which appears at the beginning of the talk but then kind of disappears and I wondered what happened happened to it the talk starts out by being a kind of critique of universalism and I think what's implied then is that localism or culturalism let's say is the position from which that critique is being exercised um but I'm not quite sure if that is what really happens in the rest of the talk I mean one could make a case for a universalist appreciation of culturalist or localist forms of temperature management, thermal management I think you're doing that but I think that could be called universalism I don't know if you want to answer I have a question that's quite similar so yeah okay maybe do all three and then you want to do you want to go with this? um thanks so much for this really great talk and I found your research very useful for my own so thank you very much um to Mark's point about governance I've been thinking about the work of maintenance in your talk um you're describing two very different kinds of hot environments one's very hot and humid one's hot and arid it makes me think about to bring it back to the air conditioning machine itself how does that governance play out perhaps in the maintenance of those machines is there some way to kind of extract some of these larger political trajectories that you are pointing to in the talk through the manual labor of working through breakdown or like what are some of the ways in which these climates are perhaps resisting this machine or reacting to this machine and are there some ways to think through that question of government governance through maintenance perhaps was you know like a follow up question um to that and then so how are questions about heat and comfort and hot and humid and arid all kind of playing out through this um this imposition of air conditioning I think my question is closer to what Mark was talking about in terms of governance and thinking about government versus management in some sense because well I think I'm quite interested in the politics of what you describe also as in some sense politics of the global south but is it when you start thinking about in terms of thermal privilege and thinking of the developmental state really using air conditioning as in some sense also a post-colonial developmental move against thermal imperialism but also what are the regimes of power that are then thermal power I suppose exposed when you're thinking about sort of migrant labour but also the place of something like Singapore and Doha in the global south right like I think so I'm quite interested in that sort of space between sort of governance but also a broader politics broader geopolitics especially in relationship to the fact that cooling produces warming somewhere else right so so how that how that works I think is something I'm curious about and I think more generally as well I was wondering if you might speak to what it means to cool in a in a sort of in the Anthropocene for the lack of a better you know in a in a warming world let's just say yeah you take your time I think these are great questions I I think it's a good question to to us in terms of governance versus management management seems much more managerial I guess much more about standard and norms and and maybe the under the kind of politics might be underplayed as Shia I think you you hinted at air conditioning as we know is a I think it's a selfish technology it cools the inside but warms the outside so heat exchange means that only certain spaces are cool while other spaces might be heated up so it's never it's never something that cools everywhere and equally for everyone so I think that there is a kind of if you like a kind of techno politics that's built into the technology in itself yeah mom I'm not sure when when does I mean I'm not sure what are what are the things that clearly distinguish between management and governance because from some from some perspective one could argue that governance is also a form of management in the vocodian sense is about a certain arrangement of things certain distribution of resources so there is a sense of you know the managerial aspect of allocating of resources and and an arrangement of certain things don't you think so I'm not sure if that in a way then begin to approximate governance in the management sense yeah but that might not be adequate in that you know Shreya your question about the uneven politics and also I think I think the most obvious thing is that Singapore and Qatar are probably not the kind of places you use straight away associate with the global south you think of them as exception and I've been asked this by Kim and and others when when they're editing the volume yeah but I I sort of try to work around this I'm not sure whether it's convincing by saying that both places are rather heterogeneous both places foreground the kind of unevenness that you see in many other places as well so parts of it especially when it comes to the migrant workers dormitory for example you would the sense of kind of an inequity would be really very much foregrounded and there's also a sense that the middle class kind of an air conditioned lifestyle is not just unique to to Singapore and and Qatar but it's also something that you see in many other parts of the global south as well so I guess it's a questions of degree of differences and this is something that I try to work around with thinking about degree of differences in that sense yeah and regarding the questions of maintenance I think it's an important one I think a few things are being maintained here firstly the use of air conditioning to maintain a certain manner of working to enable continuous working regardless of you know Diana and seasonal fluctuation so that you can keep working at your desk and you can be incredibly efficient yeah so that that is a kind of a maintenance of a certain labor regime or a certain work pattern but of course air conditioning itself requires maintenance and of course air conditioning is also used to not just maintain human but sometimes to maintain things in in a humid climate things break down easily you know because it's so moist you know bacteria or whatever grow easily so refrigeration and the cold chain is essentially about preventing things from becoming obsolete very fast to extend the shelf life of things air conditioning has that dimension too in a slightly different sense the most obvious case would be in museums and in libraries or by air conditioning is always installed to preserve the artifacts as much as to preserve human beings within right yeah is that what you're working on yeah okay yeah so so I guess that is the other kind of using air conditioning to maintain people work patterns and things and existing arrangement of people and things so that is that but air conditioning requires its own form of maintenance its own form of keeping the machines running and and and that is the part probably I've not been paying enough attention to and I've not really think about it that much yeah with regard to breakdown and resistance I have thought about it minimally to be honest I've not really think about breakdown and resistance because things don't break down that much in Singapore I guess so there are not many sufficient occasions for me to think about that there are crisis moment as with everywhere the pandemic is one of those but in general that would there are not that many moments and back to Mark your second question about universalism I probably need to examine it a bit more I I totally understand what you mean by how the talk is really not about localism or form of any form of culturalism and the kind of a local culture or thermal culture of keeping cool at all so that that part is not there other than maybe the brief mention of vernacular architecture so I I'm with you on that so probably I should look at my use of universalism because it might not be that central but I was thinking universalism more in the techno-scientific sense of you know international comfort standard that is applied in a in a rather in a uniform manner throughout different geographies so I'm thinking more in terms of that and how in thinking about cooling as a as a techno-scientific problem that is always the sense of resorting to standards to to norms to things to adhere to and in terms of maintaining that and ignoring the the different play space culture or for the lack of a better face yeah but but you are right that my tongue itself can't leave uncovered and expect perhaps to quickly follow up on that I'm curious sort of if you talk about universalism in terms of comfort has has the notion of comfort of human comfort changed over time and or is it different in different places from sort of say like the British research on like tropical architecture in the 50s, 60s to what it is now sort of has it changed in a warming world or is it different in Doa than it is in Singapore there are different comfort standards around based on different methodologies and they have arrived at different standards and norms what's interesting is that globally the two dominant comfort standard is the lab based experiment standard derived from that and then the few based kind of standard and the difference between the two is that the few based standard in fact suggests that comfort standard depends a lot more on social cultural practices and then and it has got a much wider range of comfort rather than a very narrow prescribed range for the lab based studies so I think I think that there are research done in that aspect and we can say that culture and social practices really inform comfort and a person who has written extensively on this is a sociologist by the name of Elizabeth Shove she wrote a book called Comfort, Craniless and Convenience and I think two or three chapters really look at the evolution of this kind of comfort standard and the problem with comfort standards like that rather than understanding comfort as a set of attributes she argued that comfort should be understood as a set of practices so practices are always social, culturally specific so I thought that that that is really I think in that sense I think this part of the scholarship answer the question that you have really quite well if I've got anything to say it's really derivative for what Elizabeth Shove has done Thank you Yeah, I think we have time for maybe one or two questions Thanks so much for the fascinating talk I had a question and then a speculation following on from it I was wondering if you see a shift or maybe it's a kind of parallelism between air conditioning delivered by these small commodities these boxes that can be packaged and sold to households and on the other hand large systems I recall kind of Rainer Bannam's Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment and in there there's the kind of switch the other way around from a large kind of systems akin to district cooling hospitals and so on to the packaging and commodification of this technology and we are undergoing a shift in the reverse direction what might be the reasons for that and that brings in the state and so on and necessitates state planning and intervention on such a large scale I guess my speculation following on from that is it kind of relates to some of the things Shreya was saying about I guess I think of it in terms of kind of risk spatialization of risk between zones between safe zones and zones that are abandoned or left to burn made to burn and I found there was something kind of sublime and almost terrifying in the vision that in the kind of linkage that you describe so well between oil and cooling and thermal violence and one of the things that can't be avoided is is is war and contemporary imperialism you know and oil's role in that and it seems to me that one of the bizarre things about the amount of international capital pouring into places like Neo in these new cities in the Gulf is the kind of wreckage and destruction across the rest of the region driven by contemporary imperialist wars and the creation of these safe zones supposedly safe zones and the image around that and I wonder what role cooling and the creation of these very controlled environments plays in that Thank you Yeah, I think it was Gil Cooper one of the first historian to write about the history of the air conditioning industry in the United States she made a distinction between air conditioning as an appliance like the package you need to talk about you could buy one and you install it at home and then versus air conditioning as an installation that is something that is highly customized for a building and is typically a central air conditioning system so she made a distinction between that I wrote something about that in a book that Mark co-edited looking at the installation of a particular kind of package unit in Singapore's public housing and how the public housing was subsequently designed to accommodate that so I look at the Japanese lead kind of invention of a speed unit system that is very common in Asia and now I think the other parts of the world whereby you have a one external compressor and then it hasn't got any air duct what it what it does is it links the kind of the children to various air handling units within the interior so I wrote a bit about that history of that domestic air conditioning in the Singapore context and talk about some of the differences in terms of how it interacts with the built environment and it allows for different kind of changes of thermal material culture against drawing from Elizabeth Shove's idea about how when the indoor temperature gets shifted from the regular tropics one to something that is 21 degrees celsius at 50% humidity a lot of things change yeah the ambient temperature change the way you sleep change the design of furniture change and I was talking about how you know in in many places like Singapore and many other middle class population of tropics now the duvet is part of the home furnishing whereas before air conditioning you wouldn't really need the duvet right with tropical climate yeah and there are other things as well and also for a while halogen light was the in-thing interior design because it gave a kind of warm grow and that will only make sense if you cool the interior to really low temperature so tiny little material cultural changes affecting the interior design and interior configuration so that was something that I was very interested in but when it comes to centralized cooling in office and in work environment in large offices then the degree of of customization and the degree of individualization is tends to be reduced I'm not sure whether it's the case in in in UK but in many places for example even when there's a thermostat the thermostat frequently either doesn't work or sometimes you get locked up because the building management system would really want to control the energy consumption and would like to control other things so when it's designed as a system it tends to be controlled by the so-called expert technicians and then the inhabitants of the building would not have the same kind of level of intervention in changing the air conditioning system so I think there are there's some kind of very practical everyday practices in terms of that and in terms of risk and spatialization I can't really think of anything beyond you know the idea of something that is centralized versus decentralized in terms of speculation and also this kind of emerging trend whereby social economy inequality has manifested in itself in terms of the kind of spatial inequality as well now you have ecological enclave zones that are well protected from climate change rising sea level and things like that and there are people looking at the kind of a large large scale encapsulation of interior spaces a little bit like what Peter Schlotterdach talked about in terms of the kind of climatic islands yeah we don't have much or any time but I don't want to leave our online audiences out of this so I'm going to very quickly read out two questions they're quite different but read them out together and then maybe another short answer and also we'll forward questions to chat we so if you want to send anything in online feel free and or send us an email as well the first one is a practical question on how important do you think it is for for the thermal regime of a heritage building to be preserved in governmental frameworks for instance preserving passive cooling in tropical shophouses or preserving air conditioning of large spaces in conserved podium and slab buildings and then the second question is broader it's mmm with the frequency of extreme heat we are now seeing thermal governance exercise more through climate change adaptation plans and strategies for extreme conditions climate change strategy can be slightly can be a slightly different space because it usually acts as an umbrella for other policies and it is more concerned with emergency short term extreme heat events for example how do you view thermal governance within the broader scheme of climate change adaptation so no easy task to summarize but thanks for the question I think we've regarded the first question the current I think conservation guidelines tends to privilege the visual so when you talk about authenticity you're talking about preserving something in an intact manner my belief is that I'm not a conservation expert but my belief is that it tends to privilege the visual sense so it's about visual coherence it's about visual authenticity so quite common in in Southeast Asia and Singapore and the region is that when an old colonial building is conserved it tends to be air conditioned as well and the windows will be sealed with glass panels and then what they will typically do is that sometimes they will push out the timber shutters as if there's a timber shutters there but the timber shutters will be fixed in position and behind that there is a kind of a seal by the glass piece so I saw that in a number of so-called boutique hotels based on conserved on colonial on bungalows and colonial villas so that that's what happened I do think it's useful to think about conserving the the thermal aspect of buildings as well but maybe with some level of modification and now there are hybrid technologies whereby you could you could use the combination of of some form of air cooling with the use of some form of fans as well and introduce that into the building rather than opting for the easy option to seal everything up and mechanically cool the interior space so that's my response to that the second question we've regard to the question of heat action plan and how would what is the kind of thermal governance or heat action plan in relation to also the question of time scale and the temporality of heat action plan I I really do not know enough on this so I can't really comment I'm still learning a lot about heat action plan and thinking about that in relation to thermal governance but my sense is that most of the intervention of heat action plan come in the form of one a kind of a warning system so that the general public know that a heat wave is coming to comes in forms of hydration in terms of encouraging hydration and providing maybe improving the kind of water infrastructure so that there might be more drinking points in certain societies and third less common which is providing this kind of a cool refuge of tiny air condition spaces I've seen this implemented in parts of North America and maybe in Japan yeah but I really do not know enough about this but thanks for the question thank you so much I think we need to leave that thank you to our speaker thank you to our respondent thank you to everyone joining online and for everyone here please join us for a drink and maybe some more questions